_ In 2008, Sven Birkerts published a superb survey entitled The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again in which he distinguished two important traits of successful and literature-worthy memoirs. Firstly, they utilize the Proustian (via Bergson) analysis of the involuntary memory. This can be defined as any recollection that is triggered by a simple object (think of Proust’s madeleine), usually from childhood, which allows the writer to explore hitherto unknown territory of his/her mind. The second important element is the conscious manipulation of vantage points, being able to move between the “then” and the “now” on the narrative’s timeline continuum. Difficult to master artistically, the varying of vantage points validates the writer’s “adult” or hindsight evaluations of past events and sensations, thus displaying how the writer has evolved, from the past self to the present self. As he writes in The Art of Time in Memoir, “there may be a pattern hidden in the contingent-seeming procession of circumstance.” Both of these artistic choices permeate the vignettes in Birkerts’s newest title, The Other Walk.

To call these individual essays “vignettes” may be misleading. The longest of them runs only a few pages, but individually they each radiate a sense of ongoing-ness, and collectively they form a definite whole. The essays generally follow the Proustian formula: an object—something simple that would probably have little to no teleological meaning to anyone else—immerses the writer in a series of memories that allows him to explore larger thoughts on his life and life in general. In the piece “Lighter,” the idea is to reach and read memory:

Found things and the stir they make in memory—that’s one ecology. But there’s another, no less important, that describes the shadow world: all the things we simply lose, or lose and then, on finding, find without spark. As if to say we are as much about our deletions as our accumulations.

Birkerts gives substance to these little essays for what they represent: objects and memories. Thus, the essays themselves evolve into more than just writing or ideas contained in the beginnings, middles, and ends of what constitutes an “essay.” In short, the essays become objects themselves for the reader to move into the memory of the writer.

The book begins with the title essay, “The Other Walk,” in which Birkerts unequivocally announces: “This morning, going against all convention, I turned right instead of left and took my circuit—one of my circuits—in reverse. Why hadn’t I thought of this before, given that the familiarity of the other loop has become so oppressive, even to one who swears by the zen of familiarity, the main tenet being that if you are bored with what you’re seeing, you’re not seeing clearly enough, not looking?” It would be difficult to conclude that this is an ideal way of offering a new essay, one which tests the reader’s preconceived notions of form, and one that tests its conventions in general. Nevertheless, Birkerts offers a telling thought in a recent interview conducted with The Morning News: “You wear yourself out with your own repetitions. That’s also the basis of any progress in the arts, turning against what you can’t do anymore.” One could easily picture Birkerts, sitting at his computer screen, fresh off the Art of Time manuscript, having written extensively about involuntary memory, suppressing what he knows about the traditional essay form and consciously moving into new territory. Reading these essays as simple ruminations on everyday objects and the memories they evoke would be a disservice to Birkerts. The heart of the matter regarding these pieces needs to be internalized; one must read the essays keeping in mind the amount of erudition that went into their creation. Paintings with no brushstrokes. A genealogy of process. And, in fact, Birkerts objectively correlates the idea and brings to the fore a good amount of genealogy, writing about not only his heritage, but his children as well.

The essays would be mere studies were it not for the layers of self-analysis and meditation that pulse throughout. In “Ladder,” Birkerts uses the anecdote of an early job—where he hired himself out for house repairs and painting—to illustrate the simplicity of his formula, which is exercised with an artistic mastery of pace and rhythm. He’s nervously climbing a ladder, and going against the advice of his boss he looks down, frozen. In a seemingly masochistic vault of self-awarenes, halfway up the ladder, halfway through the essay, he gazes at the ground and time slows:

I hear myself breathing and realize that I’ve stopped. I don’t remember stopping…I look down …because I need to know where I am…What have I done? I can’t unsee the distance down, or lose the sense of the ladder shrinking away to nothing below me and above me.

In an example like “Ladder,” all of the elements of Birkerts' project come together, creating a nuanced and layered account of memory and how its facets can produce something powerful. And The Other Walk abounds with such examples.

In “Brown Loafers,” a pair of shoes inspires an essay on a friend’s suicide. The writer inherits the prized loafers when the friend becomes sick and can no longer fit into them. Birkerts exhibits significant control of tone and mood here, as the piece is neither eulogy nor nostalgia; it’s simply remembrance. “Some years ago, before the big operations for heart and cancer that undermined him, long before he took his life, my great sad friend discovered the obsessive pleasures of fine clothing.” Moving between the sincere and the sardonic, he considers the memory-object for what it represents, which is more than just an item that summons the past. It not only allows the writer to connect with himself, to memories otherwise perhaps inaccessible, but also offers the only point of connection to another being. These connections also represent the necessary exchange that must happen between writer and reader; representations made on the page spark entire worlds. The essays in the collection may focus on the narratives behind whatever set Birkerts’ mind to wandering (and so to writing). His deep lyricism takes them beyond mere explorations of process, proposals set forth by Birkerts himself in his previous book. ~RS